A Cage
by Tripwire Alarm
Summary: Lust is his vestigial tail.


He sleeps a lot more now than he used to; if he could do nothing but sleep, everything would be easier. Because there's a dream he has, a dream where the other has left him on a beach with Rose, left them together and gone away to another universe. It's a dream of sweet, wistful hope that is so much better than the reality of this _new_ new life.

It's just a dream, he knows that. It's based in the reality of a singular wish that had once clung to his singular heart in the hours after his creation, after he'd woken naked on the grated floor of his burning TARDIS. When he wakes, it haunts him like the lingering ache of an old healed-over wound resurfaces with the threat of rain. (Barometric pressure, humidity, he knows the science; it's just a metaphor.)

But his imagination is so lucid. It feels as real as anything, kissing Rose on a beach while the other turns away and leaves them together. He takes her hand and she lets him.

When he's awake, the subliminal thrum of the TARDIS engines is there like a mother's heartbeat from a womb, a pulsing slow clock-tick that brings less comfort every day. He gets up, heavy and dense as a dead star, and walks barefoot down the coral gangway in the direction of the library—his only distraction— the one just past his bedroom.

Or what _used_ to be his bedroom.

Approaching to pass the closed doorway, it gaps open, and a shock of blonde and skin emerges in a long shirt—what used to be _his_ shirt—and, from the look of it, nothing else.

He pauses, thinking to wait for her to continue forward. She'll head for the galley to the right, and he'll be able to pass without incident. These kinds of strategies are his life now; how to stay in the background, how to become a shadow. Less than a shadow. Invisible. Instead of behaving according to his projections, she sees him, hanging back like an abused animal at the end of the long gangway, and does up a few buttons to preserve her modesty.

The other—the Doctor, he supposes is what she would call him—is still in the bedroom. His imagination puts him on his back in his old bed, divested of his suit, wearing nothing but sweat and a gloating smile.

Of course, why would he gloat? After all, it's not as though his world is centered on making his vastly inferior metacrisis jealous. He doesn't even have to work at that; he knows it. Why he's even been allowed to stay on the TARDIS as long as he has, he can only thank the other's inability to say no to Rose. The other's lording over him is imaginary; he doesn't care enough to go out of his way to rub his nose in anything.

The Doctor is not a cruel man; but his selfishness might qualify, in this peculiar situation, as an exception to that traditional constant. Indeed, that he's been allowed to stay at all was supposedly intended as a kindness. But more every day, he's found it to be anything but.

"Hullo," she says softly, fondly, if not a bit awkward. She never addresses him by name; she doesn't know what to call him. Every day, he's less sure of that himself.

Because for over nine-hundred years he was the Doctor. Until one difficult day, he woke up, and he wasn't. _Not the Doctor he'd been_, anyway. Not the Doctor that Rose recognized as the one she'd crossed dimensions to embrace once more. Dethroned from his own life, he lives in a spare bedroom on his own timeship, and even _she'd_ had trouble recognizing him. He doesn't help with repairs. He rarely leaves the ship. The other speaks to him mostly to keep him in the boundaries they'd set up, their arrangement. He's told him frankly, away from Rose's hearing: the last thing he really wants is to spend sixty years travelling with himself, watching him growing old and weak in a way he never will.

He can't blame the other. If things were reversed, he knew he'd feel the same. Would act the same. Would make the same arrangement. Enforce the same rules.

This makes absolutely nothing any easier, knowing he'd do the same to the other if their luck had been reversed. He'd put him through this torture without a second thought to have what he does. To have his life back, and Rose in his arms, and a universe wide open in front of him once again.

The first rule is to steer clear of Rose without insulting her. And here she is, with her hair a bedroom riot, smudged cosmetics and flushed skin. He can practically smell the sex on her, and every day since his birth and her return has been a new, positively unique kind of torture he'd never even pictured as possible until he was living it and lowered to questioning his own identity when his memories are really all he's got left in this living, breathing hell.

Watching himself finally have everything he wants, looking through the prison bars of half-human eyes.

After every lonely, hollow day he'd spent missing her; regret sinking its roots deep and growing rampant and choking like weeds, now he spends every day desperately avoiding her. Not just because of the rules. Because being close to her hurts so much he can't breathe in her proximity. He stands with his pitiful human heart pounding in his skinny chest, his blood rushing with enough force to render him lightheaded. He averts his eyes like a scolded child. Anything to lessen the impact.

Nothing works.

"Sorry," she continues, biting gently at her bottom lip. She talks out of the side of her mouth, biting back what's almost a smile and what's almost a knife in his gut. "I…I'm never sure…never sure what I should call you."

He just gives her a grim smile that almost hurts forcing out. "Does it matter?"

She looks surprised, maybe a bit wounded. Bless Rose and her empathy. "Of course it does."

Litanies rush up his throat; he has to click his teeth shut to cage them in. Everything's a cage now. This _body_ is a cage; this new life a punishment for something he probably deserves. These past weeks living in a guest bedroom have been spent in suffering, deciding where to go to get away from this, from the sounds of themtogether coming through the ventilation, the gasps and sighs, soul-rending moans drifting up the aisleways and through the walls in the vast timecraft as though they are always in the next room.

Yes. Embarrassing as it is, there is ever present, white-hot jealousy. Shame. Angry, bitter arousal. He's passed her in the corridor every so often, hands clenched into fists at her familiar scent, the same fists he's used to violently relieve himself in the shower after she's paid him a bit too much attention by talking to him, touching him—where his once vast personal empire is dwindled down to the scalding water and his own, resentful humiliated tears—because in this worthless body he can't just turn it off like he could before.

Like the other could, if he wanted. Like he always had, like flipping a light switch to sidestep these unwanted, complicated, base biological urges. Evolutionary holdovers, like appendices and tonsils; lust is his vestigial tail. Love is a splinter, a barb burrowing into his pathetic single heart; he wants to sink his fingers in and dig the whole thing out in clutching handfuls, like a rock buried in beach sand.

To think, that for this offshoot of his consciousness, this is how everything ends. All the places he's been, the things he's seen. He'll grow old this way; he'll die one day, never regenerate. And living like this, that day almost can't come soon enough.

Never in nine-hundred years has he ever debated the fairness of anything. The universe is cruel and uncaring, it takes and kills and the strong survive. The weak are cornered and culled and eaten, their bodies contributed to nourishment of predators and eco systems. Fairness is an imposed construct created by societies to minimize advantages of natural selection. _Fair_ is not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

And this is all so devastatingly unfair, he can't stop himself from thinking it.

_The Doctor_, is what he wants to tell her to call him. _Who else would I be?_

_Don't you know me? _

_Do you know…how this feels?_

Instead, he gives her that painful smile. She licks her lips and his insides twist. He wants to touch her, wants to hold her and feel her breathe and her ribcage shake when she laughs in his arms the way she used to instead of looking at him with that phlegmatic smile like he's the man at the counter taking her order. Or rather, like he's some kind of accidental doppelganger wearing a beloved face.

Instead, he says, "What do you _want_ to call me?"

And when she looks uncertain, biting her lip the way he itches to do himself, it's actual, physical pain. She tilts her head and he can see the marks where the other's mouth has been, and a bottomless ache echoes up from the vacancy in his chest where a second heart would be broken if the universe had any concept of equity—

And he wakes up.

He wakes up shaking with a dull pain between his lungs. Rose is asleep in the dark beside him, her knee slung over his calf, the warm sole of her naked foot against his like praying hands. Her hair is the same bedroom riot he'd dreamed up; she breathes out the night air in the stoic-visaged grip of sleep.

Moonshadows stretch over the ceiling and fade while he watches, breathing controlled to combat the deep, slow panic that wraps its hands around his throat every time this nightmare surfaces from the depth, bringing with it the buried terror that it's all an illusion, some kind of cruel fever dream he's bound to wake up from one day. He listens for the familiar moaning grind of type-40 engines the way children listen for claws scraping under their bed—the phantom, impossible sound of him coming to take her away. Holding Rose, nose buried in the tangle of her hair, he lies awake the rest of the night.


End file.
